English - CEDAW Southeast Asia

A Gendered and Rights-Based Review of Vietnamese Legal Documents through the Lens of CEDAW
comprehensive moral, intellectual, aesthetic, physical and vocational education for
children, and for working closely with families and society to ensure the protection,
care and education of children.
(3)Preschools and general education establishments must meet necessary conditions
relating to teachers, material foundations for education and teaching facilities, to
ensure a high quality of education.
(4) Those representing the Ho Chi Minh Young Pioneers Organisation at schools must
be professionally trained, in good health and of high moral standing; they must
embrace their jobs and be given adequate means to fulfill their tasks.
(5) The State shall adopt policies for the development of preschool and general
education, as well as policies for the exemption and reduction of school fees, the
granting of scholarships and the provision of social support to realise social equity in
education.
Education is clearly valued in Viet Nam and the State has given it its required
importance. Over the last decade, the spending for education has steadily risen to 16.7
percent of the total spending in 2002. 411 To emphasize its focus on education, the Government
has drafted its National Strategy on Education for All, as well as included education as one of
the five objectives under the National Strategy for Advancement of Women. In the Plan of
Action for Advancement of Women, the education targets are to: (a) strive for eradication of
illiteracy for at least 95 percent of women under the age of 40 years and increase the
proportion of literate ethnic minority women; (b) increase the proportion of women holding
post-graduate degrees to over 35 percent of women; (c) increase the proportion of female
officials among those trained in professional and technical skills, information technology and
foreign languages to the proportion of women involved in professional and technical services
in all sectors; (d) strive for 100 percent of girls aged 11-14 years to finish primary education
and enter the sixth grade; and (e) increase the proportion of girls at junior and senior
secondary schools to over 90 percent and 50 percent respectively, with special attention to
remote and mountainous and ethnic minority areas. The National Plan of Action on Education
for All (2003-2015) sets gender equality as a priority with concrete goals of “eliminating gender
inequality in primary and secondary education by 2005, achieving gender equality in
education by 2015 with guarantee of female students’ full and equal access to education and
of their completion of education with good quality”.
The State has also explicitly included education in the Law on Gender Equality, which
contains specific provisions on girls and women’s access to education:
Articles 14(1) and 40(4)(a) explicitly guarantee equal age for schooling, training and
fostering courses and prohibits laying down different ages for men and women for
training or enrolment;
197
Article 14(2) provides that men and women are equal in terms of choosing what
professions or occupations to learn and train for;
411
Wells, op. cit., p. 29
Education (Article 10 of CEDAW)